Concentration ↓ · institutional
Antitrust primacy
Power concentration is the binding constraint and is visible under current competition law; preventing decisive advantage preserves the option space every strategy depends on.
Mechanism
Enforce existing antitrust law aggressively: structural separation of capability and deployment, merger review on GPU and cloud, conduct actions on exclusive data.
If it succeeds: what binds next
No AI actor dominates. Binding becomes the speed of antitrust versus the speed of capability, a structural arms race between remedy and consolidation.
A strategy that produces a worse next problem than the one it solved has not done durable work.
Falsification signal
Breakups reconcentrate within one to two years.
A strategy held without a falsification signal is not strategy; it is affiliation. Continued support after this signal lands is identity, not bet. See the identity diagnostic.
Self-undermining threshold
overshoot riskWhen enforced first against the most safety-conscious labs (because they are most visible and litigable).
Hollows out the safety end of the industry; the remaining frontier concentrates where antitrust cannot reach.
Every strategy has a stable region where it reinforces itself and an unstable region where pursuit defeats it. The threshold between them is usually narrower than advocates acknowledge.
Addresses 2 failure scenarios
all scenarios →People on the record
15Profiled figures appear first, with their tier in small caps. Each face links to the person and their full quote record. Tag: antitrust-primacy.
expertise mix · 4 profiled
recognition mix
A strategy whose endorsement skews to commentators or external-domain experts is in a different epistemic state from one endorsed mostly by frontier-builders. The mix is read carefully across both axes; see the board for criteria. Counts are over the 4 profiled people on this strategy (11 unprofiled excluded).
Cory Doctorow
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Lina Khan
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Meredith Whittaker
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Tim O'Reilly
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Carl Shapiro
UC Berkeley economist; antitrust and innovation
Chris Hughes
Facebook co-founder turned antitrust advocate
John Naughton
Cambridge / Open University; Observer technology columnist
Margrethe Vestager
Former EU Competition Commissioner (2014–2024)
Matt Stoller
Open Markets Institute; BIG newsletter
Rana Foroohar
Financial Times associate editor; CNN analyst
Robert Reich
Former US Labor Secretary; UC Berkeley professor
Scott Galloway
NYU Stern professor; tech-business commentator
Susan Athey
Stanford economist; former DOJ Antitrust chief economist
Tim Wu
Columbia Law; ex-Biden NEC special assistant on tech competition
Yanis Varoufakis
Greek economist; 'Technofeudalism' author
Coordinates
Conflicts, grouped by mechanism
1Lever opposition
same lever, opposite pullThe pair's primary lever is the same; they pull it in opposite directions. A portfolio containing both is internally incoherent on that lever.
Complements, grouped by mechanism
5Same-lever reinforce
same lever, same pull, different mechanismBoth strategies pull the same lever in the same direction by different means. They stack: doing both amplifies the pull, at the cost of double-counting in portfolio audits.
Shared authority
same legitimacy sourceDifferent levers, same legitimacy source (democratic, state, technical, market). The pair hangs together under one kind of authority; it stands or falls with that authority.
Same-side diversification
same side, different leverBoth act on the same side (AI or world) but pull distinct levers. They cover several failure modes on that side while leaving the other side uncovered.
Same-lever twins
2Both use the same lever in the same direction. Usually redundant inside a portfolio: each dollar or effort unit only buys one lever pull, even if two strategies are named.
Axis position
Source note: Antitrust primacy strategy.md